The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  70. Epstein, “To Know and Make Known, Part II,” p. 86.

  71. Philip Rahv, “Disillusionment and Partial Answers,” Partisan Review 15, no. 5 (May 1948): 522.

  72. See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press, 1963).

  73. Quoted in Mark Krupnick, “He Never Learned to Swim,” New Review (January 1936): 37.

  74. Philip Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin, pp. 305–9 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

  75. A good sampling of Farrell’s views can be found in Literature and Morality (New York: Vanguard, 1947).

  76. Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, pp. 293–304.

  77. Delmore Schwartz, “The Present State of Poetry,” Literary Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973), p. 255.

  78. See Harold Rosenberg, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Symposium 1, no. 3 (July 1931): 413–19; “Myth and Poem,” ibid. 2, no. 2 (April 1931): 179–91); “Counter-Statement and The Human Parrot and Other Essays,” ibid. 3, no. 2 (January 1932): 116–22.

  79. Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art” and “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1937): 77–98. For a useful discussion of the importance of these writings, see Frank Frascina, ed., Pollock and After (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 3–20.

  80. Introduction to “Special Issue on Debates in Contemporary Culture,” Telos, no. 62 (Winter 1984–85): 5. See also the excellent essay by James D. Herbert, “The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism,” ibid., pp. 178–86.

  81. Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, p. 60 (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957). The essay originally appeared in 1944 in Politics as “A Theory of Popular Culture,” but in subsequent reprints he changed “popular culture” to “mass culture.” For a comparative analysis of Macdonald’s views, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 200–203.

  82. “Special Issue,” Telos, p. 3.

  83. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 130–48.

  84. This pamphlet was reprinted in Literature and Morality, pp. 35–78.

  85. Jason Epstein, “Wilson’s Amerika,” New York Review of Books, 28 November 1963, pp. 9–11. During the Civil War the Copperheads were northerners who refused to support the war effort on the grounds that it was a violation of the American ideal of republican freedom.

  86. Edmund Wilson, The Cold War and the Income Tax (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 128.

  87. Ibid., p. 125.

  88. New York Times, 27 June 1965, p. 28.

  89. See Edmund Wilson’s Introduction to Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1966), pp. ix–xxxii.

  90. A description of the funeral is contained in Jason Epstein’s “E. W.: 1895–1972,” New York Review of Books, 20 July 1972, pp. 6–8.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 19.

  2. Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (New York: Avon, 1975), p. vii.

  3. Philip Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin, p. 303 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

  4. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), p. xv.

  5. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1958), p. 105.

  6. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 15.

  7. Reprinted in Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, pp. 3–7, 8–24.

  8. Delmore Schwartz, Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (New Directions, 1969), p. 34.

  9. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 192.

  10. Lionel Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 94. For interpretations of Trilling’s fiction that respond to more diverse elements than I have space to consider in this chapter, see Robert Boyers’s Lionel Trilling: Negative Capability and the Wisdom of Avoidance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977); William Chace, Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics (Stanford, Calif.; Stanford University Press, 1980); and Edward Shoben, Lionel Trilling: Mind and Character (New York: Ungar, 1981).

  11. Reprinted in Lionel Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 411–29.

  12. Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place, p. 79.

  13. Ibid., p. 115, and Lionel Trilling, The Experience of Literature (New York: Holt, 1967), p. 360.

  14. For example, see Daniel Bell, “A Parable of Alienation,” Jewish Frontier 13, no. 11 (November 1946): 12–19.

  15. Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place, p. 34.

  16. Ibid., p. 19.

  17. Ibid., p. 14.

  18. Ibid., p. 33.

  19. James T. Farrell, Literature and Morality (New York: Vanguard, 1946), p. 13.

  20. Irving Howe, “The Critic Calcified,” Partisan Review 14, no. 5 (September–October 1947): 550.

  21. Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place, p. 12.

  22. Ibid., p. 31.

  23. Ibid., p. 20.

  24. Ibid., p. 35.

  25. Of course, there are other works of fiction that concern the New York intellectuals from this time period that do not follow the pattern described. Two neglected ones are Michael Blankfort’s A Time to Live (1943), which features characters largely based on Adelaide Walker, Charles Walker, and Herbert Solow; and Elinor Rice’s Mirror, Mirror (1946), in which certain characters and episodes draw very indirectly upon her life in the 1930s.

  26. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 15.

  27. See Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 160–61.

  28. Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County (Boston: Nonpareil, 1980), p. 220.

  29. Ibid., p. 313.

  30. Elizabeth Niebuhr, “Interview with Mary McCarthy,” Paris Review 27 (Winter-Spring 1962): 58–94.

  31. Trilling, The Middle of the Journey, p. xi.

  32. Ibid., p. xviii.

  33. Ibid., p. xx.

  34. Ibid., p. 4.

  35. Ibid., p. 301.

  36. Ibid., p. 302.

  37. The biographical information is partly from Ernest Erber to AW, 15 May 1984; author’s telephone interview with Edith Tarcov, November 1983, New York City; author’s interview with David Bazelon, May 1981, Buffalo, N.Y.; Albert Glotzer to AW, 7 April 1982.

  38. Saul Bellow, “The Mexican General,” Partisan Review 9, no. 3 (May–June 1942): 178–94.

  39. Ernest Erber to AW, 15 May 1984.

  40. Saul Bellow, Dangling Man (New York: Plume, 1974), p. 191.

  41. Isaac Rosenfeld, Alpha and Omega (New York: Viking, 1966), pp. 122–52. See also the discussions of Rosenfeld in Mark Shechner, “Isaac Rosenfeld’s World,” Partisan Review 48, no. 4 (Fall 1976): 524–56; and Theodore Solotaroff, “The Spirit of Isaac Rosenfeld,” The Red Hot Vacuum (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 3–22.

  42. The biographical information is from a letter from Eleanor Clark to AW, 13 August 1974.

  43. Eleanor Clark to Leon Trotsky, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  44. James T. Farrell, “Farrell Looks at His Writing,” Twentieth Century Literature 22, no. 1 (February 1976): 13.

  45. Unpublished manuscript in possession of AW.

  46. James T. Farrell, Yet Other Waters (New York: Vanguard, 1952), p. 335.

  47. James T. Farrell to Dwight Macdonald, 29 July 1945, Macdonald Papers, YL.

  48. The biographical information on Albert Goldman is based partly on an unpublished biographical essay by Patrick Quinn; an unpublished biographical description by Albert Glotzer; and the author’s interview with Sherry Abel, June 1978, New York City.

  49. For further
information on the case and for testimony by Cannon and Goldman, see James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), and Albert Goldman, In Defense of Socialism (New York: Pioneer), 1944).

  50. The reconstruction of the faction fight is based on various issues of the Internal Bulletin [of the Socialist Workers Party] 1943–46; author’s interview with Felix Morrow, November 1982, Ann Arbor, Mich.; James P. Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the “American Century” (New York: Pathfinder, 1977); and James P. Cannon, Letters from Prison (New York: Merit, 1978). See also Peter Jenkins, Where Trotskyism Got Lost: World War Two and the Prospects for Revolution in Europe (Nottingham, England: Spokesman, 1977).

  51. See the detailed discussion of this episode in Alan M. Wald, James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. 125–29.

  52. James T. Farrell to AW, 1 May 1978.

  53. James T. Farrell to Albert Goldman, 23 March 1948, Goldman Papers, WHS.

  54. Albert Goldman to James T. Farrell, 16 April 1948, ibid.

  55. James T. Farrell to Albert Goldman, 22 April 1948, ibid.

  56. James T. Farrell, Reflections at Fifty (New York: Vanguard, 1954), pp. 61–62.

  57. New America 15, no. 10 (December 1978): 10.

  58. James T. Farrell, Introduction to Judith and Other Stories (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. xi.

  59. Robert Van Gelden, “An Interview with James T. Farrell,” New York Times Book Review, 17 May 1942, p. 17.

  60. Edgar M. Branch, James T. Farrell (New York: Twayne, 1971), pp. 139, 141.

  61. George Novack to AW, 20 September 1976.

  62. Ann Douglas, “James T. Farrell, the Artist as Militant,” Dissent 27, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 216; Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 73.

  63. Edgar M. Branch, “Freedom and Determinism in James T. Farrell’s Fiction,” in Essays on Determinism in American Literature, ed. Sydney J. Krause, pp. 62–85 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1984).

  64. James T. Farrell, Introduction to When Time Was Born (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), p. 12.

  65. James T. Farrell, Literary Essays, 1954–1974 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976), p. 51.

  66. Ibid., p. 50.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. The Marquis de Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos, 4.20.

  2. Robert Booth Fowler, Believing Skeptics: American Political Intellectuals, 1945–1964 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), p. 3.

  3. Dwight Macdonald, “I Choose the West,” Politics Past (New York: Viking, 1957), pp. 197–201.

  4. Philip Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 341–45.

  5. Arnold Beichman to Harry Carman, 25 October 1954, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, TL.

  6. For a useful study of the development of this terminology, see Thomas R. Maddux, “Red Fascism, Brown Bolshevism,” American Historical Review 75 (1969-70): 1046–64.

  7. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 186.

  8. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 127–28. Young-Bruehl mistakenly describes Heinrich Brandler, Bluecher’s mentor, as a member of the Left Opposition.

  9. Dwight Macdonald, “A New Theory of Totalitarianism,” New Leader 34 (14 May 1941): 17. Kazin and McCarthy are quoted in Stephen Whitfield’s Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), p. 5.

  10. David Hollinger’s essay, “The Confidence Man,” in Reviews in American History 7, no. 1 (March 1979): 134–41, is a fine analysis of the weaknesses in Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Knopf, 1978). The transcript of the debate, “Were the Rosenbergs Framed?” (New York: Nation Institute, 1983), summarizes many of the lingering problems in the government’s case.

  11. Rorty’s scripts are among his papers, Rorty Papers, OL.

  12. James Rorty to Andrew Clements, 2 August 1951, ibid.

  13. Sidney Hook to Andrew Clements, 15 August 1951, ibid.

  14. Sol Stein to New York Times, 14 October 1953, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, TL.

  15. Lewis Corey to Bertram D. Wolfe, 1 March 1952, Wolfe Papers, HIL; author’s interview with Edward Sagarin, December 1983, New York City.

  16. The text of Farrell’s letter appears in a statement released to the New York Times by Diana Trilling on 29 August 1956, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, TL. Farrell attributed the statement to inebriation in an interview with the author, June 1977, New York City.

  17. James T. Farrell to Norman Jacobs, 28 August 1956, ibid.

  18. See the sharp critique of the book in Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), pp. 125–26.

  19. Minutes of Planning Conference of American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 1 March 1957, Corey Papers, BL.

  20. Dwight Macdonald, “Notes on the Conference,” 29 March 1952, Macdonald Papers, YL.

  21. Dwight Macdonald, “Notes on Discussion, April n,” ibid.

  22. Dwight Macdonald, “Notes on Meeting of American Committee for Cultural Freedom at the Columbia Club, “23 April 1952, ibid.

  23. Sidney Hook, letter to the New York Times, 8 May 1953, p. 24.

  24. Lionel Trilling et al., “Statement on Academic Freedom,” 1953, Central Administration files, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.

  25. Statement by Irving Howe in [the pamphlet] America and the Intellectuals: A Symposium, Partisan Review ser. no. 4 (New York: Partisan Review, 1953), p. 43.

  26. Statement by Norman Mailer in ibid., pp. 67–69. For additional information on Mailer’s “Trotskyism,” see William C. Pratt’s “Mailer’s Barbary Shore and His Quest for a Radical Politics,” Illinois Quarterly 44 (Winter 1982): 48–56.

  27. Statement by C. Wright Mills in America and the Intellectuals, pp. 75–79.

  28. Statement by Philip Rahv in ibid., pp. 91–92.

  29. Author’s interview with Nathan Glazer, May 1981, Cambridge, Mass.; author’s interview with Clement Greenberg, May 1981, New York City.

  30. Author’s interview with Albert Glotzer, June 1981, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; author’s interview with B. J. Widick, September 1984, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  31. Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., C. Wright Mills: Power, Politics and People (New York: Ballantine, 1963), p. 603.

  32. Melvin Lasky to Dwight Macdonald, 19 November 1939 and 29 March 1940, Macdonald Papers, YL.

  33. Helga Hegewisch, ed., Melvin J. Lasky: Encounter with a 60th Birthday (London: Encounter, 1980), pp. 3–7; Melvin Lasky to AW, 2 December 1982.

  34. Melvin Lasky to Dwight Macdonald, 27 March 1953 and 12 April 1967, Macdonald Papers, YL. Josselson is identified as a CIA agent in Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 83.

  35. Author’s interview with Leslie Fiedler, May 1982, Buffalo, N.Y. Some biographical information is contained in Leslie Fiedler, Being Busted (New York: Stein and Day, 1969). Fiedler’s anti-Communist essays are collected in An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon, 1955), pp. 3–90. Rosenberg’s answer is reprinted in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), pp. 221–40.

  36. Committee for Cultural Freedom Bulletin 1, no. 1 (15 October 1939): 4.

  37. William Phillips, A Partisan View (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), pp. 148–49.

  38. Julius Jacobson, “The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman,” New Politics 10, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 99.

  39. See the first-rate collection edited by Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, The Uses of Anti-Communism (London: Merlin Press, 1984).

  40. James Burnham and Max Shachtman, “Intellectuals in Retreat,” New International 5, no. 1 (January 1939): 4–22.

  41. See Max Shachtman’s earlier essay, “Dictatorshi
p of the Party or Proletariat,” New International 1, no. 1 (July 1934): 9–11.

  42. See the discussion by Ernest Mandel in Revolutionary Marxism To-day (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 26–32.

  43. Burnham and Shachtman, “Intellectuals in Retreat,” p. 4.

  44. The biographical information on Philip Selznick is based on the author’s interview with Selznick, August 1982, Berkeley, Calif. See also the outstanding paper by Douglas G. Webb, “Philip Selznick and the New York Sociologists,” presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Toronto, 1982. Information on the Sherman group’s activities in the Workers Party are from the [Workers Party] Internal Bulletin 9, no. 8 (April 1948).

  45. Ernest Erbert to AW, 12 July 1984.

  46. Max Shachtman, “Under the Banner of Marxism,” [Workers Party] Internal Bulletin 4, no. 1, pt. 2 (1949). Erber’s statement of resignation appears in ibid, pt. 1.

  47. Meyer Schapiro to Alfred Rosmer, 8 December 1948, Rosmer Papers, MS; Jean Vannier, “A Century’s Balance Sheet,” Partisan Review 15, no. 3 (March 1948): 288–96.

  48. Author’s interview with Edward Sagarin, October 1983, New York City.

  49. Albert Goldman to Sol Levitas, 4 February 1950, Goldman Papers, WHS. The information on Albert Goldman is from an unpublished essay by Patrick Quinn; author’s interview with Sherry Abel, June 1976, New York City.

  50. Betty Jacobson to A. Tamman, 4 December 1951, Goldman Papers, WHS.

  51. Testimony of Security Clearance Hearing for Albert Goldman, 1952, ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Quinn, “Albert Goldman,” ibid.

  54. The information on Felix Morrow is from the author’s interviews in May 1973, New York City; October 1980, Ann Arbor, Mich.; December 1980, Ann Arbor, Mich.; February 1981, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  55. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files released under the Freedom of Information Act describe Morrow’s providing information on the 1953 expulsion of the Cochran-Clarke group from the SWP.